Understanding the significance of adult play in the life of modern societiesWithin the social sciences, few matters are as significant as the study of human play--or as neglected. In Play Reconsidered, rather than viewing play simply as a preoccupation of the young and a vehicle for skill development, Thomas S. Henricks argues that it’s a social and cultural phenomenon of adult life, enveloped by wider structures and processes of society. In that context, ...

This book provides an overview and analysis of the thought of figures across the human and social sciences on the character, causes, and consequences of discontent in modern societies. Exploring the important social and cultural conditions associated with modernity, it focuses on the contributions of 38 prominent scholars from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries – philosophers, historians, and social scientists – on the subject of discontent and social malaise, and individual and c...

Building on contributions from sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, literature, and neuroscience, Henricks develops a more general account of how people discover and reproduce the "meanings" of their involvements with others. Among its many themes are treatments of selves as "projections of personhood," of the ways in which self-expression has changed historically and is now experienced in our electronically mediated era, of emotions as "framing judgments," and of ritual, play,...

The Handbook of the Study of Play brings together in two volumes thinkers whose diverse interests at the leading edge of scholarship and practice define the current field. Because play is an activity that humans have shared across time, place, and culture and in their personal developmental timelines—and because this behavior stretches deep into the evolutionary past—no single discipline can lay claim to exclusive rights to study the subject. Thus this handbook features the thinking of evo...

Few books have attempted to contextualize the importance of video game play with a critical social, cultural and political perspective that raises the question of the significance of work, pleasure, fantasy and play in the modern world. The study of why video game play is "fun" has often been relegated to psychology, or the disciplines of cultural anthropology, literary and media studies, communications and other assorted humanistic and social science disciplines. In Utopic Dreams and ...

Collaborative Practice in Psychology and Therapy provides mainstream academics and practitioners with easy access to cutting-edge thinking in social constructionist psychology and therapy. This unique book is geared to readers who may not be familiar with narrative, social constructionist, or critical psychology and therapy, presenting contemporary theory and practice with a minimum of jargon. The field's leading practitioners and theorists demonstrate, through a collaborative and relation...

Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience.Despite the wi...

**From the author of Frames of Mind, the definitive account of Multiple Intelligences theory and its applications.“For those of us who suspect that intelligence is too complex a phenomenon to be measured by the single number of I.Q. derived from an ‘intelligence test,’ Gardner’s book is a refreshing experience and an open door into a whole new way of looking at human beings.” ―Isaac Asimov**Howard Gardner’s brilliant conception of individual competence has changed ...

In Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Robert M. Emerson, Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw present a series of guidelines, suggestions, and practical advice for creating useful fieldnotes in a variety of settings, demystifying a process that is often assumed to be intuitive and impossible to teach. Using actual unfinished notes as examples, the authors illustrate options for composing, reviewing, and working fieldnotes into finished texts. They discuss different organizational and ...

How does the situation we're in influence the way we behave and think? Professors Ross and Nisbett eloquently argue that the context we find ourselves in substantially affects our behavior in this timely reissue of one of social psychology's classic textbooks.

“A fascinating short book” on the perils of 21st-century capitalism and its near-complete takeover of our everyday lives (New York Times Magazine)24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expres...

Merging cognitive science with educational agenda, Gardner makes an eloquent case for restructuring our schools by showing just how ill-suited our minds and natural patterns of learning are to the prevailing modes of education. This reissue includes a new introduction by the author.